


Crown on the Ground

by versacefrolic



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, F/M, Gen, Gender Issues, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-10
Updated: 2013-10-10
Packaged: 2017-12-29 00:07:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/998523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/versacefrolic/pseuds/versacefrolic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The hard/soft dynamic has no better home than in the sick, sweet smiles of three very different girls who shelter curious pasts replete with sharp, unforgiving edges. Lambs in wolves' clothing are still lambs fit for slaughter. A fractured character study of Kairi, Naminé, and Xion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crown on the Ground

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, again! Fancy seeing you here. Instead of working on original writing, I'm back in the trenches with something that's been bothering me for awhile. I've been wanting to see Kairi, Naminé, and Xion as more than love/sex objects or foils for the male protagonists, but I found the fandom surprisingly void of anything that fit that description. If you know of any, point me in their direction. In the meantime: be the change you want to see in the world. This whole first chapter is an exercise in reclaiming the joy of writing. Bear with me while I try to get it right.

She's smoking in the corner when I walk in, socked feet up against the wall, crossed at the ankles. The chemical, cloying smell of strawberries hangs heavy in the air, a joint sporting the flavored rolling paper of the week held aloft, pinched between her nails. I've seen pictures of girls like her on the Internet, doing what she does on sunny, silent days. Soft, faintly sleazy like a naughty angel—apparently it's a _thing_ now. She calls her self “soft grunge,” complete with air quotes so I don't know if she's joking. She's a study in contrasts, my fingers itching to sketch creamy knees and henna red hair. Predictably, she isn't wearing any pants.

 

“Skank, put some clothes on,” I say, dropping my keys in their customary spot—on the floor by the door where they clatter, collapsing brightly—before shrugging out of my hoodie. Classes had been weird and boring, left me aimless and desperate for sensory input. I shouldn't have worn shorts. Every time I wear shorts, the people around me stare. I remember a time where I was forced to participate in a group project, one of the members counseling me through a moment of anxiety. He said no one cared enough to ridicule me—who was I to them that they'd trouble themselves with my lilting stutter, my long-sleeves pulled over my hands? I never found out if he was right or wrong; I just did it and hid within myself for the rest of the class. Sometimes, I feel like that's how I spend most of time here, manifesting on this spinning rock: grin and bear it for fifteen minutes under the spotlight before winking out like a falling star.

 

She gives me the finger, perfectly manicured, through an inhale, blowing smoke out the open, screen-less window. “You're home early,” she says, her speech lethargic, dreaming, as she pads over to me in her socks, setting the joint between my lips. I could photograph her like this: inviting and disarming all at once, socks up to her knees and a bow on the panties that sit just under her hips. She could be selling teen fashion, could be reclined and upside down with perfectly styled hair, smoked eyes and a red, bitten pout. Instead she's in the apartment eating cherries, offering me a joint. I don't want to inhale, want to drink two glasses of ice-cold water instead, but I do. I always do.

 

“The Theatre professor never showed up. We left after twenty minutes of staring at the podium in silence.”

 

“Maybe it was like... performance art. A statement.” Her hair looks good even unwashed, strands swept across her forehead and that sleepy, indulgent smile.

 

“Well, I'm not paying 40k a year for symbolic lectures,” I say, burning my fingers on the joint.

 

“Whoa, whoa. Someone needs to chill,” she says, lifting her hands up like a ward against my negativity.

 

“It looks like you've been chilling enough for the both of us.” I survey the apartment's current state of disarray—pits of cherries in clumps like path-markers for fairies littering flat surfaces, the curling citrus rinds she's forever paring away with her pastel pocket knife. I can see the knife against her calf where it's secured by her sock, tucked there like a secret—a promise—next to her lighter. Just last week she was waving it at the assholes who catcalled us walking out of the theatre.

 

“Hey, sexy!” Some baggy-pants, sideways hat idiots with the bass turned up in their Honda.

 

“FUCK YOU!” Kairi screamed automatically, flinging two fingers up in the air.

 

“Bitch!” One of them shouted back. In half a second Kairi had her knife out, brandishing it fearlessly as she marched up to their car.

 

“Yeah? How 'bout I pop your fucking tires? How much more of a bitch will that make me, then?” The guys went all quiet, the idiot behind the wheel dialing the stereo down to just whispers. They mumbled apologies, stared at the asphalt. “That's what I thought,” Kairi spat, flicking the blade closed. The pale mint of the handle looked good in her hand, offset by nails the same shade of red as her hair. I tried to remember for later, filling in pages with ink and color. “Next time you call someone a 'bitch,' you better make damn sure they deserve it, otherwise they'll make sure they do. Pussies.”

 

She's all curves and sharp angles in unexpected places, endlessly surprising, which is partly what I like about her. The other part has to do with how hard she hugs, how I could be the wrongest person on earth, making the worst decisions ever, and she would still stand on the same side as me. Us versus Them. Us against the world, and who gives a fuck if we're right? Being around her is like being on fire, being awake and alive to the glory of it all. And she does roll some pretty sweet joints.

 

“Let's go somewhere,” she says, stepping into a pair of cut-offs she left on the couch. There are cherry-stained fingerprints on the front.

 

“Where?” I ask.

 

“Wherever.”

 

***

 

It's beautiful up here, up in the clouds where all the sunlight is, undiluted. I never want to leave, want to let the wind lap at me like waves, blade of grass in one hand, a smoke in the other. Naminé sketches while I dissolve against the earth, just breath.

 

“Open your mouth a little,” she says, a colored pencil working in her hand. I stick my tongue out and lift my shirt up, flashing her. I stopped wearing bras when I stopped going to classes, cut the sleeves off most of my shirts. Bare skin in the rain, under the sun. “Classy,” she says, sketching away. There's so much beauty here; I don't know why she spends time drawing me when she could be communing with all of _this_.

 

“Give it a rest. Chill.” I toss a pack of smokes at her, giggling as they glance off her shoulder and nearly tumble down the side of the mountain. I can feel her staring at me in that contemplative, slightly disapproving way before she tosses her journal to the side, stretching out next to me on the grass.

 

“You know how you get itchy after lying out here?” She stares up at the sky, hands clasped against her stomach. “Someone told me that it's because grass is sharp, like thousands of little swords, fairy swords. The itching is from sword wounds. All these little cuts made by tiny blades of grass.”

 

“Lies,” I say, but I like the idea of little creatures stabbing me, desperate and furious. Let them try. Me, Gulliver, come to destroy armies.

 

“Did you meet Xion's new girlfriend?” I can see her hands fidgeting, desperate for those damned colored pencils again. She takes all these different kinds of pills, this “medicine” morning, noon, and night, but I don't think it helps. She needs things in her hands: paintbrush, cigarette, Xacto knife, roll of LifeSavers. She doesn't fidget then, fingers turning things over and over, memorizing them by heart. It's no wonder she's such a great artist. She lives there, makes herself a home inside the ink, inside the brush.

 

“Ex.” Xion's ex-girlfriend, a pretty little thing with snakebites. Wore all these rubber bands on her wrist that she snapped all damn day. Not that I don't know why, but it didn't make it any easier to bear, watching Top Chef and hearing the _snap snap snap_ of her fantasizing about all those knives. Xion sure knew how to pick 'em.

 

“Already?”

 

“They didn't appreciate the incense she kept burning. It smelled like a church on Easter Sunday. You know how they hate that shit.”

 

“ _They_ need to realize that people aren't perfect,” Naminé huffs, examining her nail beds.

 

“Pretty sure Xion knows all about imperfection, Nami—”

 

She cuts me off in the way she often does, slashing her hand in the air. “We aren't having this conversation again, K.”

 

“No, apparently not, since you won't ever _talk_ about it.” She sits up abruptly, grabbing for my pack of smokes. Ever since Xion gave her shit for drawing them “too girly,” it's like Naminé's taken personal offense.

 

“We're not born automatically knowing all this shit about pronouns and what the fuck ever.” She swears when she gets angry. It's attractive, a flush settling on the tops of her cheeks, her gestures growing rigid, striking with finality at imaginary objects in the air. “It takes a little learning, for fuck's sake.”

 

I'm torn between telling her to chill, agreeing with her, or asking if she's PMSing or something. I settle for focusing on the unicorn-shaped cloud in the sky, the one carrying a scythe. “Would _you_ fuck Xion?”

 

“What? Don't be ridiculous. She's my best friend,” she says without missing a beat.

 

“They.”

 

“For fuck's sake, THEY are my best friend.” She blows a perfect ring into the sky. From the angle I'm watching, it circles the sun briefly before dissipating.

 

“You know what they say about friends and lovers,” I wink, trailing fingertips lightly up her arm. “And you've got great pussy-eating lips.”

 

“Gross.”

 

“It's not _gross_. If your pussy was being eaten, you wouldn't be saying 'gross.'”

 

“Yes, I would,” Naminé grumbles, her face coloring. “No one is ever, ever, _ever_ putting their face down there. Never.”

 

“Bo-ring,” I yawn, stretching, acutely aware of the way my shirt rides up my torso, sunlight smoothing across bare skin. She's always been like this: pretending to be a prude like Xion and I haven't spent countless stolen moments rifling through her journals. For someone so averse to eating out, she sketches an awful lot of vag. “Flowers,” she'd called them when I snuck up behind her to force a confrontation. Right. Flowers with clits and labia and shit.

 

Feeling around beside me for my phone, I check my texts and realize Xion has sent no less than 30 messages. “Aw, shit. We gotta motor.”

 

“What's up?”

 

“Guess who locked themselves out of the apartment _again_?”

 

***

 

It smells like vagina and cigarettes in my car, that's what I notice when I pull the door open and throw myself inside, like the smell is part of the car itself now. Can I help it that girls practically throw their panties at me in an attempt to get some? No, I can't help that. I can't help that I chain-smoke to assuage my social anxiety, that I wipe my fingers damp with girl spit all over the back of the seats as opposed to sticking them in my mouth. How many does that make it? Am I supposed to lick my fingers clean each time? There's so much DNA in my car, I'd be the number one murder suspect if any of these chicks ever went missing or turned up dead. I can't stand to be in here one second longer, but Kairi and Naminé are at least thirty minutes away. I have to piss like a racehorse, and the only option available to me is to go back _ther_ _e_ , back to that crazy bitch trying to electrocute me with a straight iron. No. I'd rather piss in the bushes. In fact, that's what I'm going to do.

 

I dart out of my car, making a beeline for the bushes at the side of the apartment. Bees hoover warningly around them, but when you gotta piss, you gotta piss. I'm popping a squat when I hear voices, man voices, coming around the corner. For that one instant I'm torn between continuing anyway or wiping with a hand and shoving my jeans back up. It's this split second of hesitation that loses me the moment necessary for wiping, instead yanking my jeans back up mid-stream. Great. Just great. Two guys appear around the corner, stopping dead in their tracks.

 

“Hey,” one of them says, winking like a fucking moron. These days I don't even respond. Iterations of “Fuck off, I like girls” aren't as effective as staring at them blankly until they shrug and walk away. Eventually the guys do exactly that, whispering something about “dyke” this or “dyke” that. Wow, is it really any wonder that I prefer girls to _that_?

 

The acrid smell of urine bothers me, the way it's trickling down my legs, my jeans, and goddamn am I an idiot or what? I could've just grabbed my key off her counter before I left, muttered some kind of half-assed apology. No, instead I ran like a coward, grabbing a Coke from her fridge first, but leaving the only key not attached to my pants.

 

“The hole is too small,” I'd told Kairi.

 

She laughed herself silly. “That's _definitely_ what she said.”

 

“Your maturity knows no bounds,” I'd rolled my eyes exaggeratedly, holding up the apartment key. It had been three years of us living together. You'd think I'd have found a better solution than losing approximately 12 keys in the last 36 months. We made a box of spares unbeknownst to the landlord, but we can't just leave them lying around. So they're in a box under my bed. Which is exactly zero percent effective in every single lockout situation.

 

I'm not forgetful, it's not that. Impulsive, more like. I get urges to do things, and I do them. Think later, live now. It's not too bad of a way to spend your life. I know K agrees, how she quit school full-time because it violated that one golden rule. Why slave away in a class on literary theory when you can wait a couple tables a day and hang out all night? It's a good way to get in trouble, obviously, but we aren't doing too bad for ourselves. We have a place to live, food to eat. There are lots of ways to be unhappy, but not so many ways to find a sense of contentment, to experience joy without having to kill yourself for it. I think we've hit the magic equation, the delicate balance between not giving two shits and giving too many of them.

 

“Loser,” Kairi smiles, hopping out of her car. “What's this, number 28?”

 

“Try 12,” I say, raising a chin at Naminé. She waves, hand at her waist. She's so cute it's nauseating. “Where'd you guys go? Nami grass stains all over her skirt.”

 

“Foxwood. Too bad you were busy sucking face with that methhead,” Kairi says right in my personal bubble, eyebrows arrogant and teasing. Personal bubbles don't exist in Kairi's world, people becoming extensions of her favoritism, her grace.

 

“Ketamine, not meth,” I say, shrugging. “And she was too busy trying to kill me with hair styling tools to be sucking my face.”

 

“Semantics,” Kairi says waving a hand as Naminé laughs. Like fire and water, the two of them, one all fever and one a steady ebb and flow. I could set my clocks to their responses, have exact trajectories mapped out before they move, their Darko-esque wormholes just outside tangible reality. I like to think I prefer Kairi's passion to Naminé's stoicism, but all flavor all the time is just another way of saying no flavor at all. If you couldn't already tell, I'm not an _or_ sort of person. Give me both, give me all. “I trust she didn't like being broken up with?”

 

I smile, lip ring grazing my teeth as my mouth parts. “They never do.”

 

***

 

I didn't like her when we met, waiting in line for hours to see Kairi's favorite band of the minute, the way she vacillated between genres like a metronome. You can't sit next to someone for six hours knowing full well that you have at least one thing in common and ignore their existence. I mean, I tried, but Kairi has never been like that. She talks to everyone, no matter how outside the social norm they reside. It was inevitable that Xion, sitting cross-legged in her Doc Martens that matched Kairi's Doc Martens, would fall into the fold. Those skinny Levis and haphazard V-neck, pierced lip and single tattoo of a fox running up her arm—it would've been clear in any other scene except this one—she looked at home in the rubble of teenage waste: Diet Coke cans and pizza boxes.

 

Kairi, licking the pizza grease off her fingers with a slice hoovering near her mouth, scooted the box in the dark-haired girl's direction. “Want some?”

 

The dark-haired girl, correction: dark-haired person, shrugged. “I don't eat meat, though.”

 

Kairi bit at the triangle in her hand, mouth drawing away long strings of cheese that draped themselves becomingly over her chin. I laughed, picking them away and putting them in my mouth. “No worries,” I'd said then, aware of the way her eyes watched my mouth. “We don't like meat, either.”

 

From then on, from that moment of witnessed intimacy, she was one of us.

 

And of course I didn't like her. I didn't like the hungry way Kairi, _my_ best friend, looked at her. I didn't like her boy clothes and her nonchalance. I liked it less when I came home from class to find Kairi with a ring in her nose, Xion's piercing apprentice supplies laid out on the coffee table. I liked it less when Xion got in my face after I called her a her after she came out to us, talked a lot about pronouns. Them a her. Whatever. I called Xion a girl, and Xion doesn't want to be called a girl. But she, fuck, _they_ aren't a boy, either.

 

“Say it with me, Nami: _genderqueer_.”

 

“I'm not going to use Tumblr lingo just because you think it's relevant. This is the _real world_ where _real life_ things happen. People are boys and girls and men and women. You have a vagina, don't you.” It was a statement, not a question. Xion was absolutely livid then, even though we laugh about it now.

 

“So do transexuals,” Kairi quipped, and I wanted to rip her fucking face off.

 

“You stay the fuck out of this,” I said, jabbing the air in her direction with a finger. “If you have a vagina, I'm going to call you a girl.”

 

It wasn't my finest moment, I agree. It wasn't Xion's when they stormed off into their room and stormed back wielding a giant purple dildo, which they proceeded to slap me across the face with.

 

“I've got a dick, too, bitch. It's purple and double-ended. Want me to fuck you with it?”

 

There was a moment of shocked incredulity, Kairi's mouth wide open, Xion's eyes glittering with anger, welling up with those hurt tears of rage I'm so accustomed to. They hadn't done it playfully; I saw stars when they hit me, felt my face throbbing like I'd been punched with a fist, not slapped with a sex toy.

 

“Not today, thanks,” I whispered, feeling the sting of my cheek, tasting blood where my teeth cut into the soft underside. “I'm sorry,” I added immediately. Xion crumpled then, threw the dildo aside and pulled me into a hug, crying against my neck.

 

“So sorry, I'm so, so sorry,” they'd said over and over again. Over the next few weeks—the bruise blossoming, turning green, then yellow on my face—they apologized a thousand times, probably. Xion never had to apologize. Being hit like that flipped a switch in me. I'm still trying to adapt to this new way of thinking, and I make mistakes, but I will never again tell them what they are and what they aren't. There's the issue of grammar, of course, and I'm totally the girl who goes Nazi on the whole “you're” versus “your” thing, but does it matter? In the end he _who pays_ _any_ _attention to the syntax of thin_ _g_ _s will never wholly kiss you_. That's Cummings, by the way. He didn't care much for grammar, either.

 

Things got better after that. Between the three of us, I mean. For me they got worse as they often, inevitably, do. And then better, usually, which is hopeful—there's always something I can look forward to, even if it's a Keatsian longing for a future that I'll drown from before ever reaching. But I've been doing worse for a long time now. Worse every day, Kairi massaging Mederma onto the parts of my thighs that atone for every lie I've ever told. She doesn't see the new ones on my hips, doesn't question my aversion to swimming. My best friends; they think they know everything. Kairi knows how to measure my sadness by the quality of my laughter. Xion knows how to notice when I disappear in office supply stores. But there is so much more. My little bag of tricks, ever expanding.

 

Even when Xion is at their most despondent, their swallowing surf can't match the suffocating black waves that I conjure up from my place in the sea.

 

***

 

Any time we eat things with plants in them I'm reminded of my catechism classes in elementary school, a wafer of the body of Christ nearly in my mouth before I'm reprimanded by the sisters. _Better a meal of herbs where love is_. Basil tastes like foreign places I'll never visit, tastes earthy and pure against the burst of feta, Xion humming to the scratchy Kenny Loggins record they pulled from a pile of “ironic” vinyl we harvested from Goodwill. Nami plays sommelier this evening, using Google-fu to cross-match flavor profiles. The bread, some French something or other that crunched nicely in my hands when I tested it at the market, is soft and squashy inside, more memories of little bread rolls spun between my fingers, food fit for an army of fairies. It's moments like this that fuel me on the cold, empty nights where I get to be alone with myself and what my life hasn't become. An armor for sleep, this roughly hewn happiness. We aren't the richest or the wisest, but we rage hard in our little bohemian apartment.

 

“'EVOO' sounds like the name of a Pokémon or something,” Xion says, drizzling oil over a nearly assembled sandwich. Sandwiches for dinner. Ah, the life of (mostly) college dropouts. I sashay over to where they're standing at the counter, hips swaying along to “Footloose,” take the bottle of oil from Xion's grasp and slide my hand into theirs, pulling them away from the counter and pushing our hips together.

 

“Dance with me.” Ours is a frantic swaying, hips colliding off beat, the rivets on their jeans catching against the pockets of my shorts. I spent years of my life in dresses and skirts, so I dedicated one year to shorts alone. No pants ever, no anything but undies if I can help it. I like my bare legs against the sticky sweat of summer, the way approaching autumn lays cool on my calves, creeping up against my knees. I don't care how it looks. I gave up caring how it looks, what people think. Let them think what they want. I don't need their opinions. I used to think I did, cramming myself into boxes fit for consumption. Funny how the world looks one way in high school, a series of colors you're told you must pick from, never even imagining the dusty rose, the silent blues that inhabit the real, other world. Like Aphrodite from a shell, kicking seafoam in the surf, I'm new to this place where the rest of the real world lives. Am I dying? No. When I'm dying, I'll figure it out. For now? I'm twenty-three and I don't give a fuck what I'm doing tomorrow. I don't have a 401k, I don't have health insurance. I don't have a dollar in my bank account, and _I don't care_. I'll care when I'm 30. I'll care when I'm dead.

 

Naminé watches us from over the neck of a bottle of Beaujolais, the corkscrew twisting away in her hand. I'm forever losing cork inside the bottle, each time telling them that it's good for the flavor. In reality, my ineptitude at simple things is humiliating. Just one more thing not to give a fuck about. School, uncorking wine bottles, boys. God, boys and their infuriating dismissive shrugs. Boys and their Call of Duty marathons, eating and sleeping by console remotes. I wore this sexy underwear for you. Don't I get a, “Congratulations, Your Cunt Tastes Like Nectar” award? I ate nothing but fruit and yogurt for two weeks, and I get a peck. A “hey, babe.” Fuck boys.

 

“I wish you were your brother,” I say against the fine hair at the nape of Xion's neck. I'm a little high—I'm always a little high—but I know Xion forgives my flighty, forever-changing opinion of their fraternal twin. They got all the ease, all the concern. Sora got...

 

“No you don't,” Xion smiles, twirling me deftly.

 

He got the bluest eyes this side of the Pacific, skin that tans golden under the favor of sunlight. He got straight, clever teeth that refuse to leave trails on my skin, even when I demand it. He's too soft with me. I've had enough of the soft, fuzzy things in this world. What's wrong with a little violence? His hands on my waist with their timid touch like I'm made of china. I've broken enough times to know that's never been, will never be, true.

 

“He won't ever dance with me like this,” I say, crashing our hips together, grinding up against the front of Xion's jeans.

 

“No nice boy does,” Naminé says, walking over with glasses of wine for us both. Xion crinkles their nose over a taste, tonguing the liquid from the backs of their teeth. “Can you fault Sora for having manners?”

 

“You can't fuck manners,” I say, downing my glass in one.

 

Xion shakes their head the way they're always doing. We've done this a million times. Over and over, the same silly side-stepping dance. “This isn't Weird Science, K. You don't get to cut out your favorite parts and paste together the perfect person. He does his thing, but he's gunna be there for you in the end.” I suspect they get annoyed every time I tell them all the things Sora's doing wrong. I don't do it on purpose, but it comes out like vomit, all this bottled up frustration. In every single instance where it's pretty obvious what I want him to say or do, he has this exhausting habit of doing the exact opposite. “When I leave you, like I am inevitably always leaving, you will praise the high heavens for Sora's unchanging, rock-like support.”

 

“'Rock' is the operative word in that sentence.” Of all the personalities in the world, he gets the one that functions on hope alone. It makes him cheerful, endlessly optimistic, and sorta... one-dimensional. All peaks and no valleys. Hope alone won't pay my bills. Hope alone won't buy my weed. Hope alone won't finagle some poor sucker into pissing in a cup for me so I don't get fired from work. Maybe that's why Sora is driven by it; none of the rest of us are. Tanks on empty, one vice to the next, while he's happy to bounce around from class to work like the present really is a gift and not some ridiculous truism.

 

“You're mean,” Xion says, handing me a plate with a sandwich the likes of which Emeril Lagasse would fawn over.

 

I have often been accused of being mean. I take it in stride—it means I've been honest in a dishonest, lying sack of shit world. Would you rather someone be a nice liar? Sometimes I catch Naminé in lies. She is my best friend in the entire universe, I would slit a bear's throat for her, but it kills me to watch her lie to my face. Strange things, too, like reasons for skipping class. Like meeting someone she couldn't have possibly met in the park. Weird boys she's going on dates with who don't actually exist. She's so sweet, so sincere in the way she lies—which makes it all the worse. I'd rather hear it hard and fast, the truth like a blade in under my ribs. Mean? A kind lie is crueler than any punch to the gut, and it hurts just the same.

 

“Damn right,” I say, clinking a glass with Naminé.

 

***

 

I am not now, nor have I ever been my brother. I have not had his strength or his courage. I have not had the privilege of being a straight white male in a world where straight white males own the food you eat, the land you live on, and the clothes you wear. He shines in the light, I inhabit the dark. What could I ever be but his shadow? I have none of his enthusiasm, none of his pride. I have a fractured sense of self that I stick together with band aids and watermelon LipSmackers from the last girl I kissed. I have a self studded with rings and the desperate wish for the cunning of a fox. But I am as cunning as a beaver. A beaver eater. I am as cunning as an ox. If I were truly cunning, the world and everyone in it would have to watch themselves. So maybe we're better off with my promiscuous flitting from flower to flower, taking all the blame and none of the glory. I am just a person trying to be a person; who am I to the Big Bad World?

 

Riding bikes as fourteen year old twins, the way he can balance with no hands. That is Sora: daring to be free at a self-propelled velocity. I am two hands at all times. I am ten and two on the steering wheel, in the moment, in the now. Forget who I was, who I'll be—instead I care about the taste of her pussy in my mouth, care about the feel of her insides coalescing around the two digits I have working inside her. There, in the inside of all things, there is a silence. Getting back to the womb, back to the wordlessness and the peace. I am not now, nor have I ever been my brother, but things were so much easier when we were both inside our mother. With no sight or sound, I was pure love. Maybe that's what I'm looking for in the sloppy cunts of each twice-fucked lover: the ghost of the womb, the memory of a silent world where I was never, ever alone.

 

Kairi and Naminé, eyes like the deep blue sea, make me feel like a part of something worthwhile. I am no longer just the shadow, the queer other to Sora's blistering presence. I am part of a trio, the crucial Holy Trinity, the third leg of the tripod where, without me, the other two collapse. I hope I am that. I want to be that. I want to be indispensable to them, to both of them, despite how Kairi smokes herself into a stupor every day, how Naminé conceals this veiled dislike of me, of who I'm trying to be. Can I help that I'm not here or there? Can I help that I'm both, that I'm all, that I'm AND, never OR? The ampersand tattooed on the back of my neck that no lover ever finds, curious more about what I present than what is behind me, what is inside me. I would suck the life out of Naminé, would live in the sweet curl of her lips, run that spun gold through my fingertips to memorize the feel of _airy thinness beat_. Her Donne and her Pope, her Wordsworth and Keats. God, I could devour her whole if she'd just stop being afraid of what I mean. No, we don't exist in the world of OR. No, I am not a boy. But no, I am not a girl. Yes, I will tongue your clit until you scream for mercy. Yes, I will turn you to just whimpering in my hands. Can't you see I am exactly what you need? All your judgement, all your artistry. I will unlearn all the fear and hate in you. I will cut your hair perfectly. I will burn your retinas with an imprint of my likeness, and you will sleep to dream of me, of only me, like I dream of you, only you.

 

Gotta stop with it. It's going nowhere. It has always ever gone nowhere with girls like her. Too pretty to touch. Cold like the frozen north, and distant. So far away, I don't think any leap of faith or physicality could ever reclaim her from where she lives. I've tried asking K about it, about the scars that circle her thighs like crowns of thorns. There's some talk about being kidnapped once, which to this day Naminé has never even alluded to. Some talk about therapists bringing out the dolls—where did he touch you, show us, where, how—about being made to draw pictures of events. Can you imagine? The tiny little girl scrawling with Crayolas men in black with overlarge, threatening hands. Crayon depictions of terror and abuse. It doesn't sound real to me, sounds like the kind of thing you'd see on the news, in a movie. She's supposed to be broken, but all I can see is how beautifully she's put herself back together. We're just a perfect bunch, aren't we? Kairi and her dead parents, Nami and her stolen past. And me with my... with...

 

I hear giggling from their room, the one they share. Kairi is still milking her grandmother for tuition money even though she dropped out two quarters ago, and Naminé gets money from some invisible place that seems inexhaustible. She could easily afford the master, would make it a hell of a lot easier on me and my Hot Topic salary, but it is what it is. I let them do their thing, and neither of them bats an eye when I bring home dinner. And by dinner I mean a girl. Eating out in bed is easy, is soft, is buttery bliss and the quivering, crying messes they become. But on nights like this, alone in a bed for two, I wish I was better integrated in this Unholy Trinity. I wish there was no delineation, no blurred line to separate us. I want to be whole, to be One. Alone here, in this bed for two, I am inescapably one. The idea of it being forever, of never finding that other to complete my halfness, terrifies me. I'm queer, and I'm here, and I'm ripe for the taking, the tasting. Where is she? Where? Where are they? Is him? Or am I just chasing Sora's memory around the globe, circumnavigating a dizzying expanse for the remains of something that doesn't even exist anymore?

 

Me with my yearning, reaching up out of me like a living, sentient thing. I want so much to feel it again, to be unalone in a world that teaches us that loneliness is the human condition. There is no language I can speak that can make me heard by them, a wordless mouthing while I stare in the mirror and tell myself that I want what's reflected there, that I will make myself whole. It never works: I don't understand and I understand too much. There are no tricks to self-love, self-fulfillment. I know all the lines about being satisfied with yourself, about loving what you have before you can give it to someone else. Bullshit. I want to be fingered until I'm panting into a mattress, mascara smudged all over a pillowcase. I want my asshole tongued and fucked, I want my hair pulled. I want my tits sucked, and I want them sucked now. I won't ever love this fucking prison of a body I was born into, and I'm supposed to feel ashamed that I hope someone else out there might? No. There is no shame in wanting to be loved, in wanting to be fucked. They are real. My other half is real. And I'm going to find them. Maybe, then, they can tell me all the things about me worth loving.


End file.
